Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography, Artificial Intelligence, and the Missing Capillaries

The earliest stages of diabetic retinopathy (DR) are clinically characterized by the presence of microaneurysms. However, it is well established that diabetes is histopathologically characterized by capillary loss long before microaneurysms appear and long after microaneurysms disappear. The juxtaposition of these facts may lead one to wonder why the clinical staging of an ischemic disease has been limited to semiquantitative assessments of perfused vascular features, such as number of microaneurysms, dot-blot hemorrhages, intraretinal microvascular anomalies, and neovascularization. The short answer is that the tools necessary to clinically detect and quantify impaired capillary perfusion have been lacking until now.
Source: JAMA Ophthalmology - Category: Opthalmology Source Type: research